Dialogue > Article > Ethical Evolution

In the film The Day After Trinity, a group of scientists involved in making the atomic bomb reflect on “what happened.” How could the best educated men and women in the world work toward such destructive ends?

Robert Oppenheimer, the Trinity Project’s lead scientist points to the problem: “I have felt it myself. The glitter of nuclear weapons. It is irresistible if you come to them as a scientist. To feel it’s there in your hands — to release the energy that fuels the stars. To let it do your bidding. To perform these miracles — to lift a million tons of rock into the sky.

“It is something that gives people the illusion of illimitable power and it is, in some ways, responsible for all our troubles, I would say — this what you might call technical arrogance that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds.”

Later in the film, one scientist says some questioned whether the first test explosion would dissolve the atmosphere, thereby causing all life on Earth to perish. Yet the experiment went ahead as planned. Educator Parker Palmer notes that the scientists’ actions were in line with the education that produced them. “It was the natural outcome of their desire to know.”

It was once believed that the advancement of intellectual development and critical thinking would lift humankind out of the dark ages of myth and superstition into the light of civilization and culture. Education’s moral purpose was to shine the light of critical thinking on every aspect of our society. Our free, democratic society was founded on the belief that enlightened individuals could act in a morally responsible manner, without the help of the aristocracy.

The early 1900s brought great optimism about the progress of humanity and our achievements in enlightening the masses. Then came two events that startled the world: the Holocaust and the atomic bomb.

In the years after the Second World War, the awful truth began to dawn on all who prized the development of intellect. These were acts carried out, not by uneducated, unenlightened hooligans, but by doctors, lawyers, engineers, scientists, politicians — intellectually developed individuals highly trained in the same critical thinking we prize today. How could enlightened people commit such barbarous acts?

This realization stirred a great crisis in western society. Like Oppenheimer, we understand something is wrong with our education. We see what people can do with their minds, yet find this is “in some way, responsible for all our troubles,” as Oppenheimer claimed. We know this is not a random occurrence in our culture. Our society’s current approach to education reflects the same “technical arrogance” that Oppenheimer knew intimately.

The early development of intellectual capacities in our children is an all-consuming pursuit. It is no longer carried out in the name of enlightenment, but in the name of jobs and staying ahead.

Schools boasting of early achievement spring up like dandelions. Educational games, programs and toys for young children, some even claiming to work on children in the womb, compete for parents’ dollars. There is a frenzy to push academics earlier into childhood. Our children are treated like laboratory rats as “marketers,” with little or no knowledge of human development, offer the newest technology to be tested and tried.

This rush to intellectualize our children is a crime against human development that has a crippling, rather than an empowering, effect on them. A story from Zorba the Greek captures how our best efforts can have unimaginably tragic results.

As Zorba walks to work along the beach one morning, he comes upon a butterfly emerging from its cocoon. Captivated by the miracle of life, Zorba leans close to watch it unfold before him. The butterfly crawls out onto a branch and waits for the rising sun to warm up its wings. Zorba watches and waits, but grows impatient, knowing work is waiting for him. So he coaxes the creature into his hands and, with the best of intentions, gently warms the butterfly with his breath. To his horror, the butterfly flaps about, its wings stick together and it crumples in his hand, where it writhes until it dies.

Zorba later tells his friend, “That little life is the greatest sin against my soul, for through my action I violated the eternal rhythms of nature.”

Like Zorba, our actions may be well-intended, but the violation of the eternal rhythms of nature in childhood is no light matter. We treat our children as if they were hothouse peppers being rushed to market, then wonder later what is wrong with them when we’ve worked so hard to give them every opportunity. The effect is serious and real, sitting as one of the great sins on the soul of our modern educational history. But this arrogance is not limited to academics; it is as broad and as wide as our culture.

Quite recently, the development of free thinking has met with a backlash, which is supported by a growing mistrust of freedom. This backlash holds the assumption that people can no longer be trusted to think and act freely unless bound by strong, imposed moral values. Coercive attempts to impose forms of morality have multiplied, either through political means or through psychologically manipulative programs that reward children for accepted behaviours.

Religious fundamentalism has risen dramatically in recent years, and attempts to take over politics and education by fundamentalists in the United States is evidence of where the battle is being fought. The anti-scientific sentiment in these groups points to their perception of the problem.

Some schools have realized our education lacks something essential. Many attempts have been made at creating “moral” or “values” education, or character programs, or courses on ethics in order to balance out our one-sidedness. Many programs offer students the opportunity to use their intellect to chew on ethical dilemmas as a form of ethical development. But Lawrence Kohlberg, the father of modern moral education, found in his work with Harvard law students that, although they could “reason” at the highest level of moral judgement, this did not necessarily translate into ethical behaviour.

Other studies have shown a high correlation between moral judgment and action but, interestingly enough, the cultivation of intellectual moral reasoning was not a factor. In The Moral Life of Children, Robert Coles suggests the relational context of forming moral judgments is a strong determinant for moral action. Coles followed the lives of several children involved in the integration of all-white schools in the southern U.S. during desegregation.

One black girl named Ruby Bridges caught his attention as she walked through the crowds of angry adults who hurled abuse at her everyday. She was smiling and nodding at them. When Coles asked her about this, she replied, “I’m praying for them.” As Coles probed deeper, she told him “God knows what is happening, and He won’t forget, because He never does,” and that “there will come a day” when things will be different.

An even more startling study detailed the experience of a young white boy at the same school. He told Coles: “I didn’t want any part of them niggers here. They belong with their own and we belong with our own. Then those two kids came and they had a rough time. I said ‘Go nigger, go!’ along with the rest. But after a few weeks, I began to see a kid, not a nigger — a guy who knew how to smile when it was rough going, and who walked straight and tall, and was polite. Then it happened. A group of boys began pushing him and it looked like bad trouble. I said, ‘Hey, cut it out.’ They all looked at me as if I was crazy, then the nigger left. But before he left, I said, ‘I’m sorry.’ That was the strangest moment of my life.” The moral courage in this young man arises from making a deep inner connection with another human being and, Coles tells us, changes his life.

This reveals to us that moral action rises out of a deep core within the human being, sometimes against all predictions. We have come to a time when educators must open themselves to new possibilities when considering how to create people who can exercise responsible human freedom. The stakes are high: a free society and our intellectual integrity.

To make this step forward, we as educators must first step back and reclaim important territory that has been cast aside by our “enlightenment.” Human consciousness has evolved over thousands of years, but our intellectual development is a relative newcomer. If we imagine that this evolution was not random, but intelligent in design, and that each stage laid a foundation for a progressive development to another stage, we might come closer to understanding “the eternal rhythms of nature” that need to unfold in each human being.

For example, people once lived in dreamy states, where they had “visions” and “imaginations,” where they told great truths through mythologies, fairy tales and fables. It was a time when they believed in angels and demons; supernatural beings appeared before their eyes, holy places dotted the landscape, events could portend great meaning, wonder and awe permeated each new discovery. Slowly, over long periods of time, the thinking consciousness of people “woke up.”

If evolution’s unfolding of human consciousness is purposeful, it may very well stand as a blueprint of child development. If we believed in evolution’s intelligence, we could imagine each person is designed to recapitulate this evolutionary journey, and slowly wake up our intellect. During this long recapitulation, capacities emerge in the human soul — awe, wonder, reverence, interest — that protect us from the potential dangers of the intellect’s development. If evolution is wise, these capacities allow the intellect to develop safely, and we can trust our children to enter life as free, socially responsible human beings. From this perspective, discovering evolution’s wisdom would be the foundation of real moral education.

Rudolph Steiner, the founder of Waldorf education, gave some thoughts on how just such a curriculum might unfold. His goal was not to create an educational system that would compete with the modern system, but one whose success would awaken something in the soul of humanity.

Steiner had a strong conviction that education should be placed in the hands of teachers, not bureaucrats. He advocated nurturing profound, long-term relationships between student and teacher. He carried the conviction that, if evolution is intelligent, then it is shaped by beings far wiser than us, who continue to join with teachers in the task of educating the child. Steiner started his first school in the aftermath of the First World War, knowing that if something was not done to turn the tide, horrible events would unfold. He was not mistaken.

His contemporary Maria Montessori used to inspire the moral imaginations of her students by telling what she called “The Great Story.” It is the story of evolution with a twist. In it she described each stage of Earth’s evolution. The rocks emerge creating land. The sea creatures purify the waters, followed by the plants who cleanse the atmosphere. The clear air, clean water and abundant food allow animal life to appear. The animals’ activity regulates the plants and stabilizes the atmosphere and provides food for the next newcomer, us.

Every chapter in the story builds on the previous chapter, and we, like Dr. Montessori’s children, are left to use our evolutionary capacities to wonder, “What is our part in this story? What can we do to bring about the next great evolutionary change?” Or we ponder deep questions like, “What is the moral purpose of education?”

It is the same question.